Earth & SkyGreek → English
Astrology
/əˈstrɑːlədʒi/noun
The claim that the positions of stars and planets shape human affairs.
The Greek roots
ἄστρον
ástron
star, constellation
λόγος
lógos
account, reasoning
Literally: “account of the stars”
The story of the word
For most of antiquity ἀστρολογία and ἀστρονομία meant roughly the same thing, and the man who wrote the standard ancient handbook of planetary motion, Ptolemy, also wrote the standard handbook of horoscopes. The two words split only in the seventeenth century, one keeping the mathematics and the other keeping the predictions. Chaucer's astrology is mostly what we would now call astronomy.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
astronomyasteriskdisasterastronaut
In a sentence
He reads astrology columns the way other people read horoscopes in fortune cookies, for the phrasing.